Speed Camera

[Gavin Brown]

Hi all, I’m new to this group and hoping someone can help me.
I live in a small town with a speed limit of 60 kms per hour, we don’t have police monitoring drivers on a weekend being such a small town.
I am wondering if there is a way to set some sort of speed detector at a certain speed and if it is over that speed a light flashes to make the driver think they have been detected on camera. We have a lot of trucks going through our town, once one thinks they have had their picture take they will be on the radio to tell others to slow down.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated as one day someone will get killed

Thank you all in advance.

[Andy Chee]

Be aware that light flashes cannot be seen during the day.  In other words, your proposed fake light flash will do nothing to slow vehicles down during the day, and would make zero impact on driver behaviour.

If you really want to do something, you need to collect evidence of speeding, and give it to police for consideration for patrolling, or local council to construct chicanes or speed bumps. 

For example, time stamped motion-activated CCTV connected to a vehicle speed video text overlay, might be sufficient evidence for police or local council to consider action.

Any other vigilante action like fake light flashes will be ineffectual (though I acknowledge that police and council themselves can also be useless!)

[squadchannel]

In Japan, policing conducted by police officers is feared, so just making a scarecrow(decoy? mannequin?) that resembles a police officer will make everyone slow down and obey the law.
Just placing a machine that measures speed, or a police car, or something else that could be mistaken for a police car would also be effective.

[jpanhalt]

I can sympathize with the TS.  I am in what we call an agricultural/residential zone.  That means there are big farms and smaller residential lots.  Trucks on the highway are intimidating and always speeding.  There is probably not a simple solution as truckers follow established routes repeatedly and soon know where such fake traffic controls are located.

As for mannequins, police used to hide behind billboards and other obstructions.  In Oklahoma, I have seen fake, life size billboards of police cars neatly hidden behind the real billboard.  I took that route frequently enough to remember where they were.

Strobe lights on our speed/red-light cameras are easily seen in the daytime.  The problem with a DIY solution is you might need radar or lidar to detect speed, and that use may not be legal for private individuals in your locale.  A passive range finder might work, but that would seem pretty complex to implement.  Simply flashing randomly at passing vehicles might also be considered distracting and hazardous.

[coppice]

I find the idea of 5 day a week policing interesting. Do they operate a 40 hour week? Nobody is allowed to commit a crime after 5PM?

[Andy Chee]

I find the idea of 5 day a week policing interesting. Do they operate a 40 hour week? Nobody is allowed to commit a crime after 5PM?

In urban city centres, police are usually rostered in three shifts; 8am-4pm, 4pm-12am, & 12am-8am, or similar variations thereof.  Otherwise, city police work similar hours to any ordinary 40 hour week.

In rural areas, limited personnel means such rostering may be difficult, if impossible to implement.  The vast distances in rural areas also pose a policing challenge.  This means rural police normally work on a "on-call" basis, with the odd patrol if they have the time.

In summary, rural police operate very differently to city police.

[calzap]

Radar speed signs that display a vehicle’s speed and flash if they are above posted speed are readily available from multiple vendors.  Just google it.  They are available with solar power, so no external power is needed.  Generally, in the cost range of US$1500-3000.  Even cheaper are plain, non-electronic speed camera warning signs.

Mike

[radiolistener]

You can spread a rumors on a local CB channel that a lot of truck drivers in your location were catch with speed limit violation, so they will slow down to avoid to be captured 

Another way is to put some fake radar (which don't detect something just simulates radar carrier), so if they using radar detector they will think that there is radar and will slow down...

Third way is to put some construction which looks very similar to radar (something which looks like radar and camera with battery powered blinking led) at very visible place... 

[CaptDon]

X-band speed radar is kind of old school (10.525GHz), most radars today are in the Ku band. You could get a gunnplexor on the police frequency and use it to trigger radar detectors however you would have to randomly pulse it on for a few seconds and then off because many radar detectors when seeing a steady carrier won't report it as police radar but instead will identify it as a house security alarm. Also be aware that certain road hazard warning signs use pulse codes which allows more sophisticated radar detectors to warn of specific hazards.